Tim Uglow ,Engineer, Sun.

How to half your 32 bit process's address space accidentally

My customer was complaining that his server process was running out of memory, malloc() was returning NULL. A pmap() of the process showed it was a 32 bit application so limited to a touch less than 4GB of
address space. The pmap showed it had only 600MB of space used, a small stack section, lots and lots of shared libraries and a 500Mb heap ( malloc stuff) that was right up to the base of the shared libraries, so had no room to grow.A bit of careful looking and there was an approximately 2gb hole in the address space starting at about 2gb - how odd!

After getting a truss of the application starting up it became obvious, it was performing a setrlimit(
RLIMIT_STACK to RLIM_INFINITY) just before the hole appeared. That call sets the stack size to 2GB ( the stack starts out way up the top of the address space near 4gb on a 32 bit application), the kernel when handing out user address space has to avoid the area reserved for the stack, so all future mmaps are located below 2GB halfing the process's available address space.